Bronx Noir

The girl turned back to her. “What you laughing at?”

“Baby girl, I was out on these streets way before you was born. Believe me, if you ain’t done a woman yet, you will. They’ll come a time when you’ll do anything that walks. That’s when you hit rock bottom. Call me then.”

Yolanda moved off and so did Jasmine, in a different direction, but then she stopped.

“How am I supposed to call you?”

Yolanda gave the girl a business card. She worked in one of the offices of St. Athanaisus over by Tiffany Avenue. “We give out food to the hungry.”

“I ain’t hungry.”

“Not yet, baby girl. Give it time. It’ll come. In the daytime, you got my office address. Anytime you want, you call that number. That’s my home number.”

“I don’t do women,” Jasmine said again, this time a little louder. Maybe this old lady didn’t hear too well.

“Quit it,” Yolanda said. “I ain’t axed you to do me. I don’t do women either. Hell, it’s been a long while since I done a man. I’m just offering you a hand up—a place to stay a few days, get a little food in you, a little rest.”

Jasmine thought this over a moment. She sized up Yolanda and took a chance. “How about a little money now? A little something so I can get what I need and get off the streets.”

Yolanda smiled. “Nice try, baby girl, but I ain’t got no money.”

“I got a knife,” Jasmine said. She pulled it out of her jacket pocket and tried to open it, but she didn’t quite have the hang of it. The move was clumsy.

Yolanda laughed. “Maybe so, but I see that taxi man drove away with all his blood still inside of him. Put that thing away fo’ you hurt yourself. Even if you kill me, I still ain’t carrying no money.”

Jasmine did what she was told and felt a little foolish, but only a little.

Yolanda walked away calculating how long it would take before she got a phone call in the middle of the night asking for a place to stay. She gave Jasmine a week.

The next night, 3 a.m., the phone in Yolanda’s one-bedroom apartment rang. Jasmine was sobbing and couldn’t get the words out.

“Baby girl, I can’t understand you. I’ll come pick you up. Where you at?” She really didn’t even have to ask. The spot Jasmine had worked the night before was the worst territory—secluded, dangerous, and low in traffic. Most johns wouldn’t drive that far from civilization and the ones who did probably wanted to get away with something they couldn’t do where screams might be heard. That was the only spot a small girl like Jasmine could work, especially if she couldn’t flick a butterfly knife open. The older, bigger prostitutes wouldn’t let her near their territory.

Hard to imagine what rape is to a prostitute. The two young men Jasmine told Yolanda about had done all they wanted with her and some of it involved pain—deliberate, not incidental. It wasn’t until the men were zippering up that it became a rape.

“Which one of y’all got my money?” Jasmine had said. Her voice was quiet. Shaky. Maybe that’s what gave them the confidence they needed to just laugh at her.

“What money, bitch?” one asked. He was tall, blond, muscular. Maybe he played football. He smelled good. His hair was short. That was the description Jasmine gave Yolanda.

The other one, a bit shorter, heavier, sweaty, dark-haired, glasses. He didn’t laugh. He had been the more painful, the more degrading one—this man reached into the car, found an empty forty-ounce beer bottle, and walked up to her. He smashed her in the face twice. She fell to her knees and he slammed the back of her head twice more. She was on hands and knees and would have fallen flat on her chest if she had thought of it, but she wasn’t good at playing the whipped dog yet. She wanted to stay as close to on her feet as she could get. This dark-haired one kicked down on her back several times until she collapsed. He continued to kick until his friend dragged him away, pulled him off her. Then he launched the beer bottle into the night, over a fence.

“Shit!” The dark-haired guy yelled at her. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” His last kick was aimed at her ear, but he missed her altogether and stumbled back to the car. The car, she remembered in full detail. Porsche, black, New York license plate—YODADY.

All of this took until sunrise for Jasmine to explain. The story went through her mind so often, starting and stopping at different humiliations. By the time she got to the details of the descriptions, she was broken again, crying herself dry.

“There, there,” Yolanda said, patting her back. “Let it all out. It’ll make you feel better.”

“I’ll feel better when we put these guys in jail.”

For what? were the words Yolanda wanted to say. She wanted to explain that no one was going to care if two white boys beat up a Puerto Rican prostitute. Hell, they wouldn’t care if the prostitute was killed. You could see from the news that you had to murder a whole string of prostitutes before anyone started searching. Instead, she said nothing.

Jasmine fell asleep on the sofa. Yolanda brought a chair over from the dining room and sat watching her.

The next day she asked for leave from her job. It was a mission from God she was on, and the priest she ultimately reported to was a man who respected missions from God.

At the start of September, three weeks of vomit and chills later, Jasmine was mostly clear-eyed. Yolanda’s eyes, however, were bleared from lack of sleep. It was hard work making sure a young drug addict didn’t just escape and get what she wanted by trading herself.

Yolanda had asked over the last weeks where Jasmine ran off from, who her parents were, what her real name was, but she hadn’t gotten anything more than, “My name is Flor,” which sounded like a lie. She preached at the girl about the value of one’s own name.

“My father was a very proud man. No money, no education, no fancy nothing, but he had his name and no one could take that away from him. He could give it, but it couldn’t be taken away. You understand?”